New Hole CD? Love it or leave it

Thursday

May 6, 2010 at 6:00 AM

Craig S. Semon Tracks

Sixteen years ago, Courtney Love dared us to “Go on, take everything, take everything. I want you to,” and fans eagerly did.

Well, what happens when there’s nothing left to take or, better yet, what’s left is badly damaged and beyond repair? Unintentionally and on purpose, Kurt Cobain’s widow/Hole’s soul-survivor deals with this issue on “Nobody’s Daughter,” a series of often unflinching and in-our-face character studies of sick and depraved female protagonists who were doomed from the start. In an album that could be called “Ophelia’s Revenge,” there’s plenty of grave digging, mud slinging, mental breakdowns, ghostly encounters and plots of revenge. In other words, Love is up to her old tricks and visiting her familiar stomping grounds.

Hole’s first new album in almost 12 years is a “Hole” album in name only. With two tracks written by Love, four co-written with Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan and five tracks written or co-written by Christina Aguilera and Pink’s scribe Linda Perry, “Nobody’s Daughter” sounds like a collection of leftovers from 1994’s “Live Through This” and 1998’s “Celebrity Skin,” which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, the bulk of the material sounds like it has been overly fretted and sonically neutered. Sure, Love still has an engaging gutter-mouth — and she even utters the most taboo word in the English language here — but some of the arrangements are not raw and visceral enough to garnish our attention, let along leave a lasting impression.

If Love is going down, she shows she has every intentions of dragging us all down with her on the opening track, “Nobody’s Daughter.” It only takes a couple of lines for Love to be spinning out of control and predicting her own horrible and hellish demise. Everybody’s favorite walking train wreck threatens and chastises how dangerous, doomed-and-damaged abandoned and mistreated dames can be. Accompanied by chimy guitars and swooping strings, Love delivers a dreamy sense of desperation as she gathers up all the broken doll parts and digs her own burial plot.

Knowing Courtney, the title “Skinny Little Bitch” could be a thinly veiled reference to anyone from Lily Allen to Billy Corgan. That’s not important. What’s important is Love is a fierce and ferocious force to be reckoned with, and this track harkens back to her “Live Through This” glory days. Spitting up her stinging venom, alongside crunchy guitars and locomotive bass lines, Love jumps into the tortured psyche of a scrawny, drugged-up and dried-up streetwalker “born of sour milk” and reeling from the “vile sex horror” and “cheap drugs hell” that is her life. The best part of the song comes near the end when Love unleashes a throat-shredding howl and incessantly repeats the song’s title alongside revved-up, grunge-friendly guitars. This is the classic Courtney that we know and love and are a little bit scared of.

On “Pacific Coast Highway,” Love has a date with destiny, and all those who took advantage of her better run for cover. With shades of O.J., Love barrels down the PCH with a loaded gun in her hand and mental list of guys who turned this once easily “overwhelmed” and “undersexed” damsel in distress into damaged goods in a tattered dress. If you buy into the premise that Love was once “overwhelmed” and “undersexed,” you are treated to a half-cocked Courtney warmly threatening, “Your whole world’s in my hands.”

Love introduces us to a hooker with a heart of bile on “Samantha” Besides the title character imagining her disgusting clients as human hibachis waiting to be ignited, Love paints a bleak, disturbing picture of a prostitute who is dead and hollow inside, and doing tricks to bide her time on Earth. Before this lost cause is put to bed, Love breaks into a catchy, anti-cheerleader rap (a “Hollaback Girl” for salty foul-mouthed sailors if you will), in which every fourth word is the F-bomb.

The 45-year-old riot grrrl rocker examines the burden of being a celebrated basket-case on the open book confessional, “Letter to God.” In what would have worked better as a Twitter message than a full-blown song, Love asks the big man upstairs why she has been tortured and scorned since the day she was born. At wit’s end, Love’s introspective interrogation is delivered in breathy whispers and the layered guitars and sparse piano give the song a quasi-power ballad epic quality that doesn’t quite work.

Knowing it’s going to take more than Mr. Bubble to make her squeaky clean, Love scrubs and scrubs until she gets bloody and course on the deliciously depraved ditty, “How Dirty Girls Get Clean.” Her vocals are sometimes muffled (as if she is screaming into a pillow) but it’s crystal clear that she’s going to get the last word.

In what sounds like it was inspired by passing out in front of the television while watching Turner Classics, Love imagines herself as a 21st-century Scarlett O’Hara and even adopts one of the “Gone with the Wind” heroine’s catchphrases as a personal mantra on the acoustic-tinged closer, “Never Go Hungry.” Not since Carol Burnett has a more unlikely person stepped into the famed Vivien Leigh role. While the sentiment is all well and good, most likely the listener will be inclined to think of Rhett Butler’s famous last words, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

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